


Blood & Ink

by alanabloom



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Tattoos, my favorite things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-06
Updated: 2014-06-06
Packaged: 2018-02-03 16:57:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1751954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alanabloom/pseuds/alanabloom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Felix starts to forcibly drag her out of the tattoo parlor;  Delphine casts a hopeful look at her new, concerned friend behind the counter, but he merely looks happy to be relieved of the ethical dilemma of permanently marking a drunk and injured foreign woman.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blood & Ink

"Bad night?"

The man asking the question has three holes gauged in each ear, one of which is connected to his nose ring with a thin silver chain, a stud in his tongue, three rings on an eyebrow, and a left cheek mostly obscured by a tattoo. And there is such unexpected softness in his face, and painfully genuine concern in his voice, that it makes Delphine want to cry.

She can practically hear him thinking _abusive boyfriend_ , and she runs her hand over the tender, swollen skin on her cheek with a sort of detached fascination. There are several protective layers of vodka cloaking her brain, and self-consciousness feels far out of reach.

"Bad month," she corrects, hearing the slur of syllables, the thickening of her accent. "Bad everything."

His hand is already snaking toward the phone behind the counter. ”You want to call someone?”

"Oh, no. No, not that. No." _Sound sober_ , she commands herself. Over enunciating, she continues, ”I’m just here for, ah, your business. For a tattoo. Left forearm.”

Doubt furrows his brow, all that gold and silver on his face glinting at her. ”Sure about it?”

Delphine nods vehemently. She tells him what she wants. She unfolds the photo she brought and brandishes it for him to look at but refuses to hand it over.

"Soonest I can do you is at five-thirty. Can you come back in an hour and a half?"

"I’ll just wait here, if that’s okay."

He shrugs, gives her forms to sign, and Delphine folds herself into one of the three metal chairs lined up between the door and the front counter. The tattoo parlor is tiny, and there are two other customers at the moment: one man in his twenties, stretched out on his stomach while another employee (just as pierced, just as inked) tattoos something on his ass, and a girl who looks barely eighteen sitting in a chair waiting for a piercing, a friend standing beside her for support.

Delphine’s eyes settle on them, but quickly turn glassy and unfocused. She runs her palm over the currently unblemished skin of her left forearm, then has to brush away the flakes of dried blood she accidentally left behind.

A door leading to some back room of the tattoo parlor swings open, and two men emerge. The one in the front is shoving a plastic bag deeper into his coat pocket, and he pulls up short when he sees Delphine. It takes him a beat to register her identity, and one more after that to take in her appearance. ”Holy shite, what happened to you?”

Lifting her head, she blinks blearily. ”Oh. Felix.”

His face pinches in even further, the any levels of confusions revealing themselves. ”What are _you_ doing _here_?”

"I’m getting a tattoo."

Felix comes closer, eyes narrowed in suspicion - always the suspicion, even now she can’t escape the suspicion - as he bends down to study her. ”Say that again,” he demands.

"I’m getting a tattoo."

He winces as soon as Delphine’s breath hits his face. ”Oh, no, you’re not, you’re plastered.” His hand hooks under her elbow, and Felix unceremoniously hauls Delphine to her feet.

Indignant, Delphine wrenches her arm away, accidentally knocking over a display of skull covered business cards from the end table next to the chair. ”I’m not leaving,” she spats out. ”I _need_ that tattoo.” She’d just decided this morning, but it seems very, very important all of a sudden.

The other customers and employees are watching with interest, and that pisses Delphine off, especially the young girl with a new silver hoop glinting in her nose. Fuck her. Fuck her and her nose ring.

Felix rolls his eyes to the heavens. ”Yes, I’m sure it was going to be very touching. But even if you sober up and still want whatever initials or dreadlocks you had planned, I won’t let you have it done by this lot. Bound to be shoddy work. I’ll do you better for free.”

"Fuck you, Dawkins," the tattoo artist retorts without looking up from his current customers butt cheek.

"Now come on." Felix starts to forcibly drag her out of the parlor. Delphine casts a hopeful look at her new, concerned friend behind the counter, but he looks somewhat glad to be relieved of the ethical dilemma of permanently marking a drunk and injured foreign woman.

As soon as they’re outside, squinting in sunlight that seems offensively bright after the dim mood lighting and black decor of the tattoo parlor, Felix asks again, “Now, what happened to your face?”

"I slapped Rachel," Delphine answers without feeling.

Felix’s mouth falls opens. ”And she hit you back?”

"No. She sent someone unimportant after me to do it." Delphine’s lilting slightly to the right, off balance, and Felix has no choice but to grab her arm and steady her. "I do not think it was only the slap, though. I also told her I was quitting. DYAD doesn’t really allow resignations."

"Why did you slap her? Was it just the, uh. The obvious reason?"

Delphine doesn’t want to talk about that. She clenches her jaw and stays silent for a full minute, long enough for the question to die in the air between them, then says, “Did you mean it about the tattoo? Can you really do it?”

He sighs skeptically. ”Tell me what it is you want.”

Immediately, Delphine pulls the photo from her pocket.

 

* * *

 

"Do you have marijuana?"

Felix looks up from the coffee table of carefully arranged needles and ink and grins. ”Now you’re talking. Best way to relax. Hold on.”

He leaves Delphine on the floor beside the couch and bounds across the loft to the bedroom area. Two minutes later he returns, sucking in a generous pull from a joint. He holds it out to Delphine, but she shakes her head.

"I don’t smoke pot."

Scoffing, he looks at her like she’s nuts. ”Why the bloody hell did you ask for it then?”

"I just like the smell."

Felix huffs out a sigh, but his features soften unmistakably. He takes another hit and leaves the joint balances between his lips as he reaches for a needle. ”Still sure about this?”

Nodding, Delphine stretches her left arm across the coffee table, the photo balanced against the lamp they’d set up. Felix takes another moment to study it, then presses a needle against Delphine’s skin.

 

* * *

 

"Is it hurting too badly?"

Delphine shakes her head. ”It doesn’t hurt. Keep going.” She gingerly sweeps the pads of her fingers over her the tears streaming steadily down her bruised cheeks. ”This just…happens.”

Felix nods mutely and returns to his work; he’s over halfway to her wrist now.

There’s a knock on the door, overlapping with a familiar voice announcing herself, “Oi, Fee!”

Delphine closes her eyes and groans softly before she can help herself. She isn’t ready to see Sarah -still has trouble looking at her.

"Sorry. One second." Felix leaps to his feet and hurries to remove the screwdriver from the loft door and let Sarah in.

"Hey, listen, sorry about yester - oh." Surprise, not particularly pleasant. "Hey, Delphine." The surface of Sarah’s voice is polite, in spite of the probable undercurrent of _what the fuck is she doing here?_   She at least rates politeness, now. Politeness and pity.

Delphine doesn’t turn around to see the significant, questioning looks that are most likely passing between Felix and Sarah, only hears Felix’s overly cheerful reply, “We’re in the middle of some body art.”

"Serious?" Curious, Sarah follows Felix into the living room, where he immediately resumes his place on the floor and his work on Delphine’s arm. Sarah peers over, looking for the tattoo, but is immediately distracted when she gets a look at Delphine’s face.

"Bloody hell, what happened to you?"

"She hit Rachel," Felix reports at the same moment Delphine mumbles, "I tried to quit the DYAD."

Predictably, Sarah seizes on the former explanation. ”You hit Rachel? Ballsy. Why?”

Felix flicks his eyes up to meet Delphine’s, his expression caught between concern and curiosity. The alcohol blanket is wearing off, and Delphine keeps her eyes fixated on Felix’s needle, etching comforting designs into her skin, as she answers quietly, “She ordered me to do the autopsy.”

Felix’s hand stills against her arm, and Sarah lets out a slow, heavy exhale, sitting down hard on the couch like her body’s suddenly become too heavy. ”Fuck.”

"Rachel actively tried to stop testing and treatment when Cosima needed it,” Delphine grits out, the fury rising fresh in her throat just like that, making her voice louder than it needs to be. ”But now…now it’s occurred to her that she might get sick someday, too. _Now_ she’s interested in pursuing a preventative measure. _Now_ she insists I keep the research going.”

Sarah’s eyes go wide, and she shoots a significant look at Felix. Delphine knows what she’s thinking, and can’t help but hate her a little bit for it. Alison and Sarah have both danced around the subject with her, knowing it’s too soon to ask outright without seeming selfish and insensitive, but also that it's unmistakably more urgent than ever: they need the research to continue. And with Aldous Leekie dead, Delphine is the DYAD’s expert on whatever the illness is.

It’s too much to ask of her. Even stepping foot in that lab is too much to ask, right now, but especially asking Delphine to think about anything beyond Cosima. To grasp a _bigger picture_.

It’s too much, and she can’t do it.

Fortunately, Sarah seems to temporarily swallow her questions. ”So…you tried to quit?”

"Yes. But apparently, I now know too much for my resignation to be accepted."

"So you’ll still be researching the illness, then?"

Delphine levels Sarah with a scornful look. ”No. I am not going back there. I am not going to cut open her…her body.” Her voice wavers, undercutting the anger blazing in Delphine’s glare. More tears are coming.

She focuses on the hot scratching of Felix’s needle, glad for the light pain. It anchors her to the immediate present like few things have lately, and Delphine suddenly regrets that he’s nearing the end. She glances up at Sarah, at her painfully familiar features that express themselves all wrong, and suddenly all Delphine can hear is Cosima’s voice in her head, arguing for Kira’s protection.

"There will always be more scientists," Delphine tells Sarah quietly, almost pleading. "Rachel has the same vested interest in finding a cure that you do. But I can’t help her do it." Her throat narrows, voice snagging. "If I found a cure now, after I failed her, I…I think I’d somehow feel even worse.”

There’s a long, heavy silence following this pronouncement, but finally Sarah nods a little. ”Fair enough.” She frowns slightly, “But you said they won’t let you quit, so…what will they do to you?”

"I don’t know," Delphine shrugs like it’s nothing much, and her tone is flat again, dismissive. She is so tired. Grief has exhausted her, an exhaustion that vines around her muscles and soaks into her marrow, an exhaustion beyond anything mere sleep can do away with.

"Done," Felix says quietly, the syllable oddly somber in the silence.

Together, the three of them peer down at the inside of Delphine’s left forearm, the length of which is now freckled with small, black, intricately drawn dandelion seeds.

Propped behind her is the photograph, showing Cosima’s tattoo: the dandelion on her left arm, the small cluster of seeds blowing from it. The seeds on Delphine’s are exact replicas of the ones Cosima had; they start out with just one or two, spread out, but by the mid point there are clusters, rising and falling across her skin before thinning out again to a single seed in the middle of her wrist.

There’s no flower on Delphine’s skin, no visible source for the seeds, as if it’s simply a continuation of Cosima’s tattoo.

"It’s beautiful," Delphine whispers. She meets Felix’s eyes. "Thank you."

She’s crying again, tears rolling over dark and mottled skin, but she doesn’t bother to wipe them away.

These bruises, these marks the DYAD tried to leave, will fade. What she has inked into her skin is something beautiful, something that is all Cosima’s, never theirs. Cosima had marked her body with individuality before she’d even understood the significance, why it meant so much that she was permanently distinct.

Now Delphine carries it for her, carries whatever wishes Cosima had in mind when she chose a child’s favorite flower to wear on her skin.

Her fingers hum across the tattoo; it makes Delphine feel just a little bit like Cosima…it makes her feel brave.

She doesn’t care what DYAD does to her. The worst has already happened. Nothing they take from her will hurt more than what she’s already lost.


End file.
